MA2: the quick bar

The quick bar is an idea I borrowed[1] from Citymapper, which is my current favourite iOS travel app. Citymapper used to be a fairly run of the mill iOS app, with fairly limited function - then WHAM, it became this feature-insane[2], flat-in-the-Google-style, joy to use app.

Looking at mobileAgent, I was always a bit unhappy with the way the top 4 or 5 items showed up. They took up a lot of space without really adding any huge value. The quick bar design style was kind of an obvious way to do it.

The bar is quite easy to do in a slightly hackey way (which was good enough for this)[3].

When you create your RootElement, after assigning it to the DialogViewControllers root, create a TableHeaderView which has nothing in it, but is the right height:

More the "feature rich". Way more. It even has transit times by catapult and jetpack! And its quite different in focus to my app, Nearest Bus↩︎

It's hackey because the scroll bar sits UNDER the quickbar. you could insert the quickbar between the header and the UITableView, but I decided not to - it's not very noticeable (certainly not by my users), I suspect it might only be me who's noticed. ↩︎